"The Saviors" Confirms Its Author's Talent

It is such a relief to have discovered that the young playwright Bubba Weiler is not a one-show wonder. I was knocked out by his debut Well, I'll Let You Go when I saw it last year (click here to listen to my conversation about it with Weiler) and so I worried when I heard that the Atlantic Theater Company had so quickly scheduled another play of his called The Saviors because sophomore productions are often cursed by unrealistic expectations. 

The Saviors, now playing at Atlantic's Linda Gross Theater, seems to have been created first and it isn't as polished or revelatory as Well, I'll Let You Go, but it is still an engrossing work with impressively complex characters and really substantive things to say about faith and friendship, the forgiveness of sins and the stories that both we and organized religion tell in our efforts to make sense of it all.  

The entire play takes place in the sanctuary of a Catholic church in an unidentified midwestern town and David Zinn has recreated a wonderfully authentic setting, complete with stained glass windows and the slightly scary Baroque effigies that peer down on the altar. The fact that the theater itself is in the reconverted parish hall of an actual church only adds to the verisimilitude. For The Saviors' narrative centers around two of the fictional church’s altar boys, best friends Michael and Paul. They’re 13 and 14 and preparing for their upcoming confirmation ceremony and their overall passage from boyhood into manhood. 

Michael is the more exuberant and seemingly more devout, while Paul seems slightly reserved and more thoughtful. There is an obvious—if carefully unacknowledged—sexual tension between the two and I thought at first that this might be another coming out story. But Weiler, who himself was once an altar boy and who is now happily married to a man, is too gifted a playwright to settle for that alone (click here to read about the genesis of his story). He complicates his story with the arrival of a shabby stranger who stumbles into the church claiming to have once been an altar boy there and now seeking refuge from a winter storm and more. 

Despite his piety, Michael wants to send the man whose name is Julian onto a homeless shelter blocks away. But Paul not only insists that Julian stay and sleep in the church but he returns later with food and to share stories about Julian’s past and about Paul’s concerns about his future. Meanwhile Michael seeks comfort in a recently widowed church volunteer named Judy whom he admires and wants to impress because everyone in the church has heard the stories about the missionary work her son is doing in Africa.  

That’s a lot to cram into 90 minutes particularly when the storylines start to tangle but Weiler and his director Jack Serio deftly knit it altogether in a way that is entertaining and ultimately heartbreaking (click here to read more about how they collaborate). They’re aided by a superb cast. Both playwright and director were determined that the boys should be played by actual teens and they—and their casting people—somehow found two young gems. 

Ivan Howe as Michael and Julius Rinzel as Paul are delightfully gawky in the play’s early humorous scenes where the boys horse around, racing to see who can snuff out the most candles, putting one another in headlocks and trading gruesome stories about tortured saints. But they’re even more impressive in the later  dramatic scenes that call for their characters to express, often without words, the contrasting love they feel for one another and the confusions that are roiling inside them.

The adult cast is excellent too. Stanley Simon's Julian is the classic fuck-up who wants to do good but Simon also makes it clear that Julian knows that he will fail again and again.  And Crystal Fox is a marvel as Judy. She initially seems to be the play’s comic relief but Fox quietly shows how this woman knows the shortcomings of good intentions. Her final moment of truth is truly devastating.

All four of them are trying in one way or another to save at least one of the others and in the process themselves. But, particularly in the play's powerful climactic scene, Weiler seems to be saying that our sins can only be forgiven when we forgive the ones that are committed against us.